Grandma's Dictee Lesson

So last night, while I was on Beautiful Boy duty, I had to help with homework.

I hadn't thought that would pose any great problem for me since he is, after all, still only in grade 3.

You see, on Mondays, he gets his words for the week.  The number of words varies from week to week; and it could be a set of words or phrases.  He studies them all week and on Fridays the words are dictated to the class (the good old spelling drill hasn't died).

That shouldn't be too much of a challenge for a retired wordsmith.

How hard could the words be?  After all, the boy is only in grade 3.

So he hands me the list and says, "OK, Grandma, I'm ready, tell me the first word."

I looked at the list and almost choked.

My beautiful boy is in French Immersion!

Besides having no idea what the first word meant, I couldn't say it to save my soul.

And my attempts to pronounce "une bouilloire" caused no end of giggles throughout the household.

He must have told me a dozen times how to say it, but it just wasn't happening.

There is no way I can wrap my tongue around those letters (I'm still trying)!

I do, however, now know what the word means.

The next word that caused uproarious laughter was #7 -- une grenouille.

Well, didn't I just pronounce that one all wrong!

So he had to give me lessons on how to pronounce the French word for frog (you never know when you might meet one you know :))

And when I couldn't get it right, he eventually said, "Grandma, IF it was spelled in English, this is how it would be spelled," and he proceeded to write out phonetically in English how I should pronounce it in French.  And that just got me laughing all the harder because the kid just continues to amaze me!

For the curious, his words were -- une bouilloire; un bouillon; un chevreuil; une citrouille; un ecureuil (that first e has a cute accent); un fauteuil; un feuille; une grenouille; un portefeuille; une vadrouille -- and he was able to spell them correctly and to tell me what each meant.

His Report Card was definitely worthy of the reward. 

Grandma managed to pull off the giving of the reward just as she planned it too.

And my beautiful boy was a very popular boy when he arrived at day care this morning carrying that coveted book let me tell you.  He was swarmed by the other children but I think that might have had something to do with the way he was displaying the book as he sauntered into the building!

I stood at the door to try to catch his answer to the question, "Wow, where did you get that Marcus?"  "My Grandma got it for me because I had a good report card ..."   That's all I needed to hear.

Now, repeat after me : "grenouille" -- and be sure to roll that "r" ...